Air New Zealand’s “Fantastical Journey” Safety Video

For the past 8 years, Air New Zealand’s safety videos have entertained and relaxed their travelling customers, while also creating ‘magical moments’ that drove global awareness and admiration for the brand, product, network, and also the destination New Zealand.

As Air NZ embarked on their 14th safety video, it was time to turn things up a notch and challenge this signature brand channel to work even harder, in order to achieve greater cultural, customer and commercial success for the Air NZ business.

The Business Objectives were pretty clear:

NZ market: Stimulate pride among New Zealanders.

International markets: Drive awareness for Air New Zealand and spark consideration for a trip to Aotearoa.

None of the previous Air New Zealand safety videos had ever achieved 8 million views in such a short period (3 weeks), and given that only the top 1% of YouTube videos account for 90% of all views, it’s a cluttered market. Everybody is fighting for users’ attention.

The only way we could win this was to go ALL IN. We came up with a 3-phase approach:

2-week amplification phase: to get the world watching and sharing our safety video

2-day immersion phase: to keep people talking and bring the fantastical imagery to engaged users

We created a dedicated iAnalyse dashboard to show the client all the numbers from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and all their other platforms in (almost) real time.

We also created a mobile version, so the client could check the numbers first thing in the morning when they got out of bed.

On launch day, we met with the client at 5am in the Air New Zealand Headquarters, where they had booked a conference room for 2 days.

We (5 people from the agency and 3 people from Air NZ) set up our “war room” and when the video went online at 6am, everybody in the room felt the excitement and we started optimising, shifting budgets and tackling any tech issues.

Everybody loved the “war room” and the atmosphere. The client’s bosses dipped in and out to see how we were going and even gave us a high five for the best safety video launch ever.

We smashed the set goals and delivered:

over 26.8 million (!!!) views

within the campaign period, and 97% positive sentiment for the duration.